Rudolf Baranik (September 10, 1920 – March 6, 1998) was an artist, educator, and writer. Born in Lithuania, he

immigrated to the United States Immigration has been a major source of population growth and cultural change throughout much of the history of the United States. In absolute numbers, the United States has a larger immigrant population than any other country in the world, ...

in 1938, when his family sent him to live with a relative in

Chicago (''City in a Garden''); I Will , image_map = , map_caption = Interactive Map of Chicago , coordinates = , coordinates_footnotes = , subdivision_type = Country , subdivision_name ...

. His parents were secular Jewish socialists and were killed by the Nazis during the Second World War. Baranik was well known in the art world for his political advocacy, and was one of the first artists to organize protests against the war in Vietnam. Some of his best known works are the ''Napalm Elegies,'' a series of 30 antiwar paintings created between 1967 and 1974. His art was inspired by his sense of the gross inequities around the world, and he led virtually every progressive political movement within the New York art world from the 1960s to the mid-1990s. Significant exhibitions and awards include: 1981 Guggenheim Fellowship in Fine Arts, 1982 "Art Couples 1: May Stevens and Rudolf Baranik," P.S. 1, New York, NY, and 1966 Peace Tower. Baranik's art is included in many collections, including the

Museum of Modern Art The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) is an art museum located in Midtown Manhattan, New York City, on 53rd Street between Fifth and Sixth Avenues. It plays a major role in developing and collecting modern art, and is often identified as one of ...

in New York, the

Whitney Museum of American Art The Whitney Museum of American Art, known informally as "The Whitney", is an art museum in the Meatpacking District and West Village neighborhoods of Manhattan in New York City. It was founded in 1930 by Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney (1875–194 ...

and the

Hirshhorn Museum The Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden is an art museum beside the National Mall, in Washington, D.C., the United States. The museum was initially endowed during the 1960s with the permanent art collection of Joseph H. Hirshhorn. It was desi ...

. Baranik died in Eldorado, New Mexico in 1998. The paintings of Rudolf Baranik are increasingly thought to be among the most important works of the New York School painting of the 1960s and 1970s, with the late paintings in particular considered by American art critic,

Donald Kuspit Donald Kuspit (born March 26, 1935) is an American art critic and poet, known for his practice of psychoanalytic art criticism. He has published on the subjects of avant-garde aesthetics, postmodernism, modern art, and conceptual art. Educatio ...

, "the true climax of fifty years of Western abstract painting.""Rudolf Baranik: An Overview," by Donald Kuspit, a paper presented on the occasion of the memorial retrospective exhibition of Rudolf Baranik's art at the

University of Arizona Museum of Art The University of Arizona Museum of Art (UAMA) is an art museum in Tucson, Arizona, operated by the University of Arizona. The museum's permanent collection includes more than 6,000 works of art, including paintings, sculptures, prints and draw ...

, November 2000.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Baranik, Rudolf 1920 births 1998 deaths 20th-century American painters American male painters Lithuanian emigrants to the United States Political artists 20th-century American male artists